


The Astronaut Phase

by George_Pushdragon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-22
Updated: 2007-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:55:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24108586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/George_Pushdragon/pseuds/George_Pushdragon
Summary: While Ginny is off adventuring, Malfoy turns up in London with a plan that involves illegal goods and indecent acts in public places. Harry investigates more thoroughly than he means to
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Kudos: 5





	1. The Astronaut Phase

**Author's Note:**

> Expertly beta'd by sulky_rhino and geoviki, this is for twistedm. It's a little bit of Harry/Draco whimsy inspired by her comment that rather than casting Ginny as a villain, she prefers to see her "doing something amazing and feminist and far, far away".

The Cannons calendar on the office wall had crossed off eleven days in the month, leaving another six until the launch date, on the Friday evening when Harry turfed his half-finished report into the Out tray and made his way down to Circe’s. 

After nine attempts at the Floo, the last spitting him back out in a hostile cloud of ash on the office floor, he concluded that it was buggered again. Stepping gingerly past the teetering pile of unfinished paperwork on the edge of Ron’s desk, he tugged open the office door and charged through the corridor towards the lifts, keeping his head down and his pace purposeful in case any of the senior Aurors to whom he owed tardy paperwork might try to interrogate him about its whereabouts. Apart from a narrow escape when he had to conceal himself behind a pot-plant as Auror McMillan walked past with his head in an inch-thick report, all was well. He unbuttoned his collar and rolled up his sleeves as he left, leaping down the emergency stairs rather than risk getting cornered in the lift. 

The malfunction in the Floo had created a throng outside Circe’s, slowly being absorbed by its narrow doorway and disappearing into the caverns within. It still gave Harry the shivers drinking on the site that had formerly been Borgin and Burke’s, where the now sought-after nooks and the damp catacombs had once concealed illicit artefacts. Still, you couldn’t argue with popular taste, and this week, Harry needed a drink worse than ever.

Slipping through the crowd, whose conversation scarcely diverted from two basic topics - amazingly, the last round of pre-launch medical tests had failed to reveal anything out of the ordinary, and the Floo disruption appeared to be centred on Diagon, bloody typical, just what you need on a Friday night - Harry found the others in the basement bar, sprawled around the biggest table in their usual corner. 

“Harryyyyyyy!” Ron called, raising what Harry guessed to be his sixth or seventh pint. With an almost undiscernible flick of his wand, he spelled away the trickle of foam that had landed on Ron’s lapel. 

“You got a good head start, I see. What time did you clock off?”

A gap opened up on the near side of the table and the new cadet, Alexis, hooked another chair into it. With a glance around the group of Aurors and friends, Harry sat. 

“Ron took me out for some duelling practice at two,” Alexis said, turning to him with a cool shrug that made him look more than ever like the Head Boy he’d been the year before last. “We never went back to the office.”

“Most of us have been here since a bit after five, so no black marks for us,” winked Angelina on his other side. 

“Good thing you’re here though,” said Alexis conspiratorially, leaning in. “He’s been a bit out of control. He gets that way when you’re not around.”

Very subtly, Harry shifted onto the other side of his chair, away from Alexis’s warm, intimate breath.

Ron asked, “Did you finish that-“

“No I bloody didn’t!” 

Ron placated with his hands. “Okay! Okay!”

“McMillan can fucking have it on Monday!” Harry needed that drink perilously now. It wasn’t good for his colleagues to see him lose his temper. When you had the reputation Harry’s schooldays had given him, you lost the luxury of mouthing off. People didn’t take your angry words idly. 

Ron, who knew him better, was laughing. “You let him fucking have it on Monday, Harry. Do it in the hallway, will you? We’d all like to see that.”

“Fuck off,” Harry told him, holding the corners of his mouth down, and leapt up to get himself a drink before Alexis could offer. 

In the thrum of barroom noise so vague it was a kind of silence, with his sleeves soaking up the bartop moisture, Harry finally felt the day’s tension release its grip. Funny how chasing a vampire over the roof of St Mungo’s and throwing himself into thin air on the other side made all his senses sing in serene harmony, while the four days it had taken to write up the report afterwards left him cramped and snarling like a caged Horntail. 

He nodded at Tess behind the bar, who measured out a double Firewhisky, and with another glance at his expression made it a triple. It must be an addiction. He’d no more than taken the glass from her when the alcohol seemed to seep between his vertebrae, dragging the tight muscles loose. He sighed. 

His eyes were caught on the movement before he was even aware of his pupils focussing. He blinked. The back of a blond head disappearing into the crowd on the other side of the bar, ducking under one of the low-hanging ridges of the cavern above. The stiffness of movement and the ramrod spine were instantly familiar. But it couldn’t be Malfoy. Malfoy was in Europe, doing “something in security”, which is what Percy Weasley had said a good long while ago, the last time any of them had thought to remember Malfoy at all. He dismissed it and returned to the table.

“- Head of Investigations, even though he wasn’t the obvious choice,” Alexis was muttering to Angelina who, being in her final year of referee accreditation with the Department of Magical Games and Sports, was not quite up to date on all aspects of Auror politics. “And there was a bloody great – oh there you are, Harry!” 

Harry let the conversation linger in the slump it had fallen into and took a rough gulp of his Firewhisky. Better. The music went up a notch and the lights got dimmer. Even better. He tilted his head back in the chair and let his shoulders slump. The low torchlight and the thump of the music lulled him. Then Alexis’s knee came to rest against his thigh. 

“Six days til Ginny’s launch,” he said abruptly and felt the intruding knee withdraw. He made himself continue in a jovial, brittle voice. “She’ll be doing twenty-four hour simulations now. Strict diet, zero-gravity exercise programme. We should have a drink for her.”

Catching that, Ron raised his glass and sloshed another froth tsunami onto the tabletop. “My little sister!” he cried out hoarsely. “First witch in space!”

It was incredible how it always happened. Even over the music, the drinkers around them seemed to hear it. Glasses shot into the air like the spears of a well-drilled regiment and the toast went around the room: “First witch in space!” they grinned, every one of them. “Ginny Weasley, first witch in space!”

Harry threw back the rest of his drink and met their congratulatory glances with a curt nod. As Ron drew their attention with a flourishing bow, Alexis leaned into him again. 

“She’s not your girlfriend though, is she,” he said in a low, pointed voice. “Ron’s got a big mouth. Everyone knows she broke it off.”

Harry turned to him. “It’s not like that,” he heard himself say feebly as he realised just how close the cadet’s lips had got to his jaw, and took in the unflinching look in his still, brown eyes. 

Alexis murmured, “You could forget her easily enough if you let yourself have some fun.” And god help him, the only thing Harry could see was his lips, soft and mobile as they parted and flexed around the words. 

“Bathroom,” Harry forced out and stumbled up from the chair.

Passing the bar, he took a shot glass held out to him by a stranger and put it down, empty, on the table by the door. They were on a break until Ginny came back from Florida, that was all. He’d got through two years of this limbo, and he could get through six months more. They were just taking some time apart. So long as he didn’t touch anyone else, didn’t _really_ touch them, it wasn’t a break up. So long as he didn’t follow through on all of the guilty fantasies that intruded on his dreams, so long as he kept his hands off Alexis and anyone like him, they would be okay. When she came back from her tour, they’d move in together or get married or maybe go on a big trip around South America like Hermione and Ron had done straight after school. 

Making good his pretext, he headed down toward the bathrooms. There was a queue outside, or what looked like a queue until he got closer and noticed how some of the couples leaning against the wall were so tangled up together it was hard to be sure which arm or foot or bare midriff belonged to which. He was firmly averting his gaze when a pale flash caught the corner of his eye again.

It was Malfoy all right. The very top of his hair held the torchlight, glinting gold. The rest of him was obscured behind a bloke with a Beater’s build who was distractedly mouthing the front of Malfoy’s neck in time with the music, while the thrust and return of his elbow suggested the cause of the satisfied expression on Malfoy’s face. A bit thinner, a bit sharper around the face than last time Harry had crossed paths with him, it could be no-one but Malfoy. His eyes, which were screwed shut, flickered open.

For a long moment, Malfoy simply stared. Then he fisted his hand in the Beater’s hair and dragged him off his neck.

“That’s enough,” he said with a tight smile, straightening his robes – fitted and dark with something that shimmered like Augurey feather woven into its borders. “Nice work. We must do it again.”

He dodged around the man’s outstretched hand. “Now, Potter,” he said brightly. “What a happy coincidence.”

Harry retreated a couple of steps then made himself stop. Malfoy looked as chirpy as if he’d just left off a pleasant firecall with his favourite great-aunt rather than a dubious tryst with a bloke who looked like a cliff face with a beard. The folds of his robe swirled obediently around his calves, hiding any trace of impropriety.

“Malfoy,” Harry said warily.

“We have a lot to catch up on,” Malfoy shot a dismissive glance at his jilted companion and started down the corridor. “Hurry up, Potter. I don’t have all night.”

The last time he’d come face-to-face with Malfoy, at an Amateur League dinner some three years ago , he’d referred to both Hermione and Ginny in the sort of language that made Harry take a swing at him. Smirking as he nursed his bruised jaw and snarled out the offensive words again as he retreated, Malfoy had not given the impression that he intended to stay in touch.

With that last shot – which must have been more than just Firewhisky – hitting his bloodstream like fizzing whizbees in acid and nothing awaiting him upstairs except Alexis’s awkward attentions and unwelcome conversations about the brilliant ambitions of his distant girlfriend, he followed. They were going downhill, towards the depths of the catacombs where the broken bits of furniture were stacked and the light was limited to a few stubs of candles stuffed into cracks in the rock wall. 

“Here, Potter,” Malfoy said to him in his normal, slightly contemptuous voice when Harry reached the bottom of the rough stairs. As his eyes adjusted, he could see Malfoy leaning back on a three-legged table supported by broken chairs. He stopped. Friends reunited could continue their old conversation as if their separation were five minutes rather than five years. It was different with enemies. All the old words that sprang to his lips sounded petty. 

“They let you back in the country, did they?” Harry asked, shivering in the chilly air and forcing his arms not to fold themselves defensively across his chest. 

“Of course they did.” Malfoy hadn’t lost his smug self-importance. “I’m here on business. Important business. The people who matter know all about it, but I suppose they’ve kept you in the dark about my services.”

Harry was very tired all of a sudden. It was Malfoy’s fault for bringing him down here. No matter how many years passed, they would always be trapped in the same stale dialogue. “Services!” he said with all the meagre malice he could muster. “We’ve got enough thieves and murderers in the country already, thanks.”

The silence was inconclusive. 

“Amateurs, all of them,” Malfoy said, finally, and it could have been the fizzing in his head, but Harry had the distinct impression of being teased. 

He rubbed his temple and frowned. “So which is it? Robbery or murder?”

“You might be surprised,” Malfoy said quietly, and even in the gloom, Harry caught the glitter in his eyes, “where my talents lie.”

Cloaked in darkness, he slipped across the gap between them. Before Harry could object, Malfoy’s hand was hooked between his legs.

Harry gasped so deep it drew him up onto his toes. “Easy, Potter,” Malfoy murmured and, ignoring Harry’s panicked grip on his forearm, squeezed firmly. He shifted his palm flat so that the reluctant twitch in Harry’s trousers was unmissable. One more deliberate squeeze turned Harry’s knees to elastic. “That will do nicely.”

And a second later, he was on his knees. Harry’s head spun hopelessly with “Oh god – _no!_ ” and “Oh god – _blow job!_ ” and his heart leapt up to somewhere behind his Adam’s apple. He stumbled against the back of a chair, and Malfoy’s insistent hands followed, making quick work of the fastenings on his robes and trousers and roughly tugging down his underwear to free the arousal swelling beneath it. He’d had dreams – sleeping and waking – about this sort of hard-and-dirty, no-strings encounter. He’d imagined what it would be like with a stranger, when all he had to do was say yes. He’d pictured this too many times to say anything else now. 

The first hot touch of Malfoy’s mouth brought him up onto his toes again; he thrust helplessly forward and grazed a delicious edge of teeth. Pulling back, Malfoy fixed his lips around Harry’s crown and slowly, agonisingly, sank down almost to the base. It killed Harry to wait, pulsing needily in the back of Malfoy’s throat and fighting the urge to thrust. Only when he tried to press forward into that velvety heat did Malfoy start to move, sucking back and down again in a brutally quick rhythm that exploded Harry’s whole groin in fireworks.

If Harry closed his eyes, it could be Ginny, except it couldn’t in any way be Ginny because her mouth never moved so shamelessly, her fingers never gripped so authoritatively around his hips. She had never thought to slide her hand between his legs and press up against his balls while she sucked, making him ache with the pleasure of so much helpless stimulation at once. 

He couldn’t think – wouldn’t think – about who was doing this to him or why. All he needed was the firm grip of lips on his shaft, making quick, bobbing strokes that made his whole cock burn with need. But what knotted him up with heat was the sheer hunger of the act: the greedy, engulfing pressure of Malfoy’s mouth. Malfoy’s mouth. Swallowing down his cock. 

“Oh fuck!” When Harry’s orgasm overtook him, Malfoy’s merciless mouth sucked and sucked until the last pleasure was gone from him and his knees were no longer fit to stand up on.

The next thing he knew was the soft flick of Malfoy’s trouser buttons opening, just audible over the distant music. Then Malfoy seized his wrist and forcibly wrapped his fingers around a very hard length of smooth, damp cock. With Malfoy’s fingers closed in an iron grip over the top, Harry could hardly resist. Nor did he want to once Malfoy started to buck into his hand, silky hot flesh rubbing over Harry’s palm. This was another novelty: as his head cleared, he got acquainted with the details of Malfoy’s arousal. Hard, jerking thrusts – apparently he liked it rough – in exactly the rhythm he’d used on Harry, squeezing firmly around the head at the end of each stroke. His breath grew ragged in Harry’s ear. A wheeze in it that was the edge of a groan. His limbs loosened as his thrusts grew more brutal, face turning inward so that the cool tip of his nose brushed over Harry’s ear and cheek, strands of hair whipping across Harry’s mouth.

He held his breath in when he came. He writhed in silence under Harry’s tight grip, broken by intermittent wet, desperate gulps of air. And the pulsing under Harry’s fingers, the helpless spasms of another man in orgasm, imprinted themselves indelibly on the muscles of his palm.

“Nox,” Malfoy whispered shakily in his ear. Harry lunged out into the pitch blackness, a moment too late, feeling nothing. 

He stumbled back the way they’d come, breaking through Malfoy’s faltering spell, but when he reached the light, the corridor was empty. Malfoy was gone. By the time he’d remembered the right words for the cleaning charm, there was a grey streak down the front of his robes that he wasn’t sure he’d ever completely get out. 

Back in the bar, his friends’ conversation drifted around him like the meaningless hum of summer insects. Humanity, it seemed, was divided into two distinct species: those who’d been sucked off by Draco Malfoy in the dusty back rooms of a nightclub, and those who hadn’t. The world didn’t quite look the same from the other side of the line.

**

Mondays were their own special sort of Unforgivable, and this one was worse than most. Two more memos from McMillan chasing up that fucking vampire report, both proxy signed by the secretary whom, as Head of Investigations, he had acquired only a fortnight ago. Another from Briony on the staff committee reminding him that if he missed yet another safety planning meeting next week, he would have to be replaced. And the Wizengamot in its officious wisdom had passed another set of arrest and detention protocols – forty eight pages of fine print of which everyone was expected to demonstrate a thorough knowledge by the end of the week. 

Harry flicked a few pages in. “Conducting an arrest with courtesy”, it read. Not bloody likely. In any case, they never bothered to send these rules to the criminals. 

Eight-forty-five sharp saw him loitering in McMillan’s office, waiting for the meeting his second memo had requested. On the desk were mahogany boxes labelled “In”, “Out”, “Pending”, “For Signature”, “Signed” and “Miscellaneous”. Fucking prat. Harry wondered if there was a seventh box labelled “Testicles” in which he kept them during the day.

The “In” box being closest, he peered over the side of it. His eyes caught on a familiar name. Malfoy, Draco Francois Abraxas. The file was open in his hands before he’d even considered it. The first document, bearing Saturday’s date, which meant urgent work and an unpleasant weekend for someone in the potions lab, was a Magical Substance Analysis. “Powdered Erumpent Horn, Class B Tradeable Material, Use Restricted to Accredited Potions Laboratories, No Permit Issued to Suspect” was its conclusion. He flicked through the two pages of notes that were already pinned to the file. Professional security consultant. Employed by Kleins of Zurich, on temporary contract in London for business unknown. Anonymous note received in Friday’s mail warning that Suspect was travelling with illegal goods. Sweep of his hotel room (Harry memorized the name and room number, only to discover in the next line that Malfoy had abandoned it) disclosed traces sent for analysis; report awaited.

How much was a pretty bloody fantastic blow job worth? Not placing his career at risk, for sure. Not the inevitable suspension that would come with destroying or falsifying evidence. Not that much, but still ...

As McMillan’s firm step trod just outside the door, he whipped the report into the back of the unrelated file beneath it. There were plenty of negligent filers in this office. A stray bit of paperwork would raise no eyebrows once it was found. 

The lies and limp reprimands in the conversation that followed flowed like a script they both knew by heart, until McMillan noted gruffly that this was unfortunately going to have to go down as a _mention_ on Harry’s record. Harry looked him in the eye, wondering whether the _mentions_ ought to include the fact that a tosser like McMillan was hardly likely to get himself blown by a virtual stranger in the back rooms of Circe’s on a busy Friday night whereas Harry’s dick was still throbbing with the memory of it. 

After the meeting, Harry diligently went back to not writing the vampire report. It was a task at which he was becoming somewhat adept, and he thought it might be worth a _mention_ in November when performance reviews came around. 

**

Reaching the lunch room at a cheeky 12.57, he had to amuse himself with the Prophet for a few minutes at an empty table. Celestina Warbeck’s nightmare stalker. Falcons’ Keeper out for three rounds. Explosion at Gringotts’ lower levels on Friday night possibly linked with Floo mayhem. Harry perked up at that one. Gringotts’ vaults extended beneath a good swathe of Diagon and Knockturn. It could have been close to the tunnel where he and Malfoy had ... had been. With Malfoy’s mouth wrapped around him, would he even have noticed if the roof had fallen in?

“You right?” Ron interrupted, dropping down across from him with one of those revolting beetroot and salami sandwiches on his plate. 

“Yeah.”

“Listen, mate, I’ve got to run in five. New assignment, some dickwads disturbing graves outside of Leeds. Could be another Inferius cult, probably not.” Ron, who was considered a “reliable sort”, chiefly through the reflected fastidiousness that came from sharing a bed every night with the Minister’s senior adviser on Muggle Relations, always got the best assignments, despite Harry’s undeniable superiority with a wand. “We’re seeing a picture tonight. At Swiss Cottage. Come along, will you? Hermione’s been at me for a week to get you to come out.”

“Yeah,” Harry said again, and watched Ron stuff half of the revolting sandwich into his mouth.

As soon as he was gone, Harry went back to imagining what might have happened if the explosion had been just a bit closer and a bit earlier. It could have trapped him and Malfoy behind a rockfall where they’d have had nothing to do but suck each other off in the dark until they died of hunger. That’d be a nice surprise for Ginny when she came down from her tour. He sighed. When that sort of sick fantasy was the highlight of your Monday, something had to give. 

**

The film featured zombies, which meant that Ron spent most of it laughing uproariously while Hermione clutched his arm and turned her face into his shoulder at the gruesome bits. He couldn’t be sure which of them had chosen the feature, and for what purpose. They all knew that Hermione wasn’t so easily scared as all that. If she wanted to be a damsel in distress, and if Ron wanted so badly to have something to protect her from, why couldn’t they do it without the aid of a stupid zombie film, and without involving Harry? Their relationship was a mystery to him.

The film was a waste of celluloid. The only mercy was that, sometimes when he let his eyes fall closed, the sound effects reminded him of Malfoy’s breath in his ear and the slick, fleshy slap of Malfoy thrusting into his fist. 

“Have you heard from Ginny?” Hermione asked casually when they were having icecream afterwards. He pulled the folded postcard out of his back pocket and tossed it onto the table. 

“Ah,” Hermione said when she had finished reading it. “She mentions Cho twice.”

“I noticed that.”

“Do you think she wants-“

“I don’t care!” Harry spat. “Cho lives in Dublin and I haven’t fancied her for years.”

Ron excused himself uncomfortably to get a round of tea. 

“Who do you fancy then?” Hermione persisted. “Apart from Ginny.”

Hermione, who didn’t know about that one frustrated weekend in Brighton or the work dinner where he’d fucked up so spectacularly with Alexis, and who therefore presumed him to be innocent, continued. 

“She might have a point, you know. Never having been with anyone else, maybe it does make you a bit-“

“A bit what? Hermione? A bit like you and Ron?”

She didn’t miss a beat, of course. “Yes, but Ron and I both came into our relationship on the same footing. Whereas Ginny knows she’s had comparatively broader experience.”

“Are you going to finish that?” Harry said as he plucked her cone off the table, shoved most of it into his mouth and bit down. Four centimetres across the top, he calculated. He curled his fingers out of sight. Malfoy’s cock could have been just a bit thicker. He wondered how much more he could take.

** 

It was Tuesday afternoon, returning to work late from a long lunch at the Three Broomsticks and a couple of pints he should not have had, that Harry heard uniquely clipped footsteps on the marble behind him.

By the time they had passed the lifts where he should have turned, Malfoy was walking beside him. Without a sideways glance, he veered off toward the visitors’ bathrooms. Harry followed, trying to keep his steps cool, trying not to trip over his own feet. 

He found Malfoy in the last stall, leaning back against the wall with his robes hanging open and his shirt already untucked. 

“What are you-“

Malfoy seized the front of his robes and dragged him into the cubicle. 

“Shut up, Potter.” Quick and nimble, his hands were making short work of Harry’s trouser fastenings. “If I wanted a conversation, I’d have come up to your office.”

And with that he was on his knees again – a position that still made Harry want to pinch himself with disbelief. It was damn lucky that Malfoy was determined to deal with Harry’s clothes himself, because, knowing what he was in for this time, Harry’s hands were in no state to manage any sort of grip. As Malfoy began, Harry tried to imprint every movement on his memory: Malfoy lifting his cock free of his clothes, enfolding the base in his fingers, guiding it into his mouth. He’d kept himself awake the last three nights trying to imagine how Malfoy would have looked the last time he’d done this, in the anonymity of darkness. So this time he watched unblinkingly as Malfoy eased his lips lower, jaw straining to take in the width of him. He tried to watch. The moment Malfoy started sucking in earnest, his eyelids fluttered closed with sheer over-stimulated pleasure. 

Twice he pushed at the cubicle door - pointless. Each time it swung back ajar, he faced the dilemma: reach over to fasten the lock properly or leave his hand where it was, hovering over the crown of Malfoy’s head where he got the occasional whisper of Malfoy’s silky hair over his palm. He let the door have its way and thrust his fingers deeper into Malfoy’s hair. Girlishly soft and – oh god, Malfoy was using his teeth. Harry’s head smacked audibly on the wall behind him. It was a miracle what that mouth could do, that normally sat like an angry knot in the middle of Malfoy’s ratty face. 

They were clinging together now: both of his hands clutching onto Malfoy’s scalp as if the wall might not be enough to hold him up; Malfoy’s fingers fisting around the hem of Harry’s shirt, moving restlessly, palm sliding over Harry’s clenching stomach. It was worse this time, now that he could see Malfoy at work, eyes closed, with the dark flesh of his cock disappearing between those pale, taut lips. He was in danger of crying out helplessly. In danger of calling out the sort of thing he used to say to Ginny, and sometimes meant. He was swollen like a balloon with pleasure. Malfoy’s mouth moved a little faster, took him a little deeper, and Harry arched off the wall as he came. 

He’d removed his knuckles from his mouth by the time Malfoy stood up, solicitously tucked him away and drew his trousers closed again. Malfoy’s face was terribly close. He could smell the sex on his breath. Harry opened his eyes. From this close, he could see the sweat on Malfoy’s skin, the frail, unlikely laughter lines in the corner of his eyes. All thought of consequences lost in the endorphin sandstorm in his head, he wanted more than anything to draw Malfoy closer and kiss him. The creator of such intense pleasure couldn’t be anything but good. Sweet, good, virtuous, beautiful. Harry’s fingers were stroking over Malfoy’s lips before he knew what he was doing. 

Malfoy jerked away. Aligning himself against the opposite wall, he glared as if Harry were a volatile potion on the boil. There was only one way to bridge the gap between them without any possibility of objection. Harry slid down the wall and pitched forward onto the tiles. 

As he negotiated Malfoy’s slippery cloth-covered buttons with more brute force than dexterity, shocked silence met him from above. It was only when he had the flushed head of Malfoy’s arousal an inch from his nose, nostrils flooded with the intimate, fleshy scent of it, that Malfoy spoke.

“Do you have the first idea what you’re doing?” 

That did it: Harry opened his mouth wide and licked the whole length of Malfoy’s cock, base to tip, salty and soft under his taste buds. Since that shut Malfoy up with instantaneous effectiveness, he did it a few times more. By the time he worked up the nerve to take the head of it in his mouth, Malfoy was not discernibly breathing. He slid his mouth down and sucked quickly, as if sheer speed could obscure the lack of finesse. 

“First time, is it?” Malfoy bit out finally, having found not only his voice but his old habit of scorn.

Harry slowed his pace and used his tongue until Malfoy pressed against him. 

“You always were thick about the things that matter, Potter,” he went on, snarling, words at odds with the tiny, inadvertent thrusts he was making into Harry’s mouth. “Thick ... about ... everything. So fucking obsessed about your ... ideals that were .... so much better ... than everybody else’s. So full of-“

The bathroom door opened. They both froze instantly as footsteps crossed to the urinal and stopped. Malfoy’s careful hand edged the cubicle door closed and slid the lock into place as the intruder’s zipper sounded. 

Malfoy’s cock twitched against his lip and Harry surrendered to yet another stupid impulse. Very slowly, he slid his mouth around its swollen length and sucked as gently as he could, no force, only pure sensation. Malfoy as good as screamed. His hands twisting in his own robes and his pulse off the end of the scale, his body was one helpless tangle of muscle straining silently into Harry’s mouth. He rubbed the head of Malfoy’s cock against his ridged hard palate and Malfoy writhed. Going as slow as this, he could hear every wet sound his mouth made, could feel the blood in Malfoy’s cock beating against his tongue. Right now, it was the single most erotic thing he had ever done. Holding himself still, he let Malfoy buck up into him for a bit, curious thrusts becoming needy, until Harry held him back and returned to his leisurely exploration of Malfoy’s most intimate part. 

“ _Potter._ ” He just caught the whisper of his name on Malfoy’s lips, a limp reprimand that sounded more like a plea. 

Outside had gone silent. The novelty of licking salty, slippery fluid off his lips had distracted him from listening for the intruder’s departure. With one look up at Malfoy’s face – flushed and trickling sweat and scarcely familiar – he resumed a hungry rhythm that in a few brisk strokes had Malfoy falling over the edge, eyes slamming closed as he came.

When he’d picked himself up and brushed down the grit from his knees, Malfoy was approaching composure again. 

“Surprising,” he said, and the curve of his lips suggested that was the closest thing to a compliment Harry had ever received from him. “And here I was thinking you were just another straight bloke looking for a spot of revenge.”

His eyes glittered and his pink, flushed mouth strained Harry’s self-control. He swiped his thumb over Harry’s chin and brought it away glistening. 

“We could-“

“No. You work here, remember? And I have an appointment.” Malfoy was still wearing that lazy half-smile when he left. 

Alone, Harry tore off a length of toilet roll – discarding the first three layers that were shredded from Malfoy’s fingernails – and wiped his face. 

That afternoon, he finished the vampire report. This might have been an indicator of a revitalised work ethic, except that he held back from delivering it until McMillan was out of the office and took the opportunity to Quick-Quotes-copy the whole of Malfoy’s file. 

**

An Auror ought to know better than to plan a solitary evening at home doing something as mundane as reading. He had scarcely thrown down Malfoy’s file on his bed when Alexis’s head popped into his fireplace, terribly excited about a security alert at Gringotts. Alexis had only had his cadetship two months. By the time they’d searched every storage room on the lower ground level, found nothing, got yelled at by the junior night manager, searched again, got threatened by the senior night manager, searched again, found a nineteenth century Knut and a dead Chifpurzle, trudged back to the office to write the sort of report that McMillan preferred (paying particular attention to the Knut and the Chifpurzle), and finally staggered home in the dead hours of the morning ... well, by that point the cadet’s excitement had cooled somewhat. Harry was a bit proud of him. “If he wakes up at 4am and can’t find his own arsehole, he’ll be back on the fucking Floo to us,” Alexis had said. Cynicism like that, he could make a real Auror one day.

Harry left the Ministry building in a lighter frame of mind. It might have lasted if he hadn’t passed the early edition Prophets on the way home. The front page blared “First Witch in Space – 100-Hour Countdown!”

**

The following day, Harry’s professional performance defied all expectation by reaching hitherto unimagined depths of can’t-be-arsedery. After a long lie-in, he was present in the office for approximately the time it took to sit down at this desk and discover yet another memo from McMillan foreshadowing another _mention_ following the senior night manager’s complaint. This threat came complete with italics, plus underlining in case Harry did not find the italics sufficiently chastening. 

He took the next alert that came in, a Lethifold in a cellar in Putney that turned out to be a very surprised looking squirrel, and gave himself the rest of the day off. 

At home in the late afternoon, stripped down to his underpants and lounging on his bed with a packet of crisps, he lingered over his duplicate file with exactly the sort of precision McMillan kept urging him to apply to Arrest Protocol 14(a)(i) (“Reasonable grounds: “gut-feeling” is not a form of evidence”). 

The handwritten notes at the back he read more carefully this time, increasingly curious. Malfoy had been consulting to the Zurich banking industry for the last two and a half years, and appeared to have broader contacts with a good deal of the European magical financial community. Unsurprising, perhaps, since the family’s dealings with goblins ran so far back that Lucius Malfoy had been one of the very few wizards to sit on Gringotts’ board. Where and how he lived was unclear: one of the later documents was Sofia’s Head Auror reporting on Malfoy’s involvement in a street duel the previous winter. On top of it were bank records from Moscow, Amsterdam, Seville and Alexandria showing the same pattern of steady balances, sparse withdrawals, and large, irregular deposits.

There was no illumination on the source or purpose of the illegal substances Malfoy was rumoured to be carrying, nor why the Auror department should take an interest in such minor matters. 

Security was Malfoy’s trade, though it struck Harry as odd that, as reported in the final newspaper clipping which he had filched in the original from the file, the Société de Sortilèges Expérimentales had awarded him their silver medal for innovation in _offensive_ magic. In the picture above the article, taken at the subsequent cocktail function, Malfoy chatted breezily with the guest of honour, exuding the sense of entitlement that had formed Harry’s very first impression of him. In the flash of movement captured by the camera, Malfoy idly collected a pastry from a passing tray. It took an eye as narrowly focussed as Harry’s to spot it, but his fingers brushed the waiter’s as he did it. The startled jerk of the tray confirmed it. A slight smirk pulled Malfoy’s lips, just beneath the paper’s surface, just out of reach. 

**

Harry called in sick the next day and took himself back to Hogwarts. He didn’t mind admitting it, he found something reassuring in the kids who scuffled to walk next to him as he strode up to the Headmistress’s office, and something equally reassuring in the ones who couldn’t have cared less.

Headmistress McGonagall’s sternly steepled fingers were the only indication that she recollected quite well that the Ministry had its own extensive library facilities.

“Certainly you may,” she told him. “And as a member of the Auror Office, you might even be trusted to peruse the Restricted Section unsupervised. Irma will be delighted to assist, I’m sure.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled, embarrassed because, after all, he was here in order to find out whether Draco Malfoy’s pants were too perilous to get into. 

“Potter,” she said as he was pulling the door closed behind him, her tone unaffected by the years that had passed since his studenthood. She was giving him one of her most feline, impenetrable looks. “If you happen to pass the Astronomy Tower, do beware of flying objects.” 

He blinked at her blankly.

“It appears to be one of the more popular launch sites for miniature spacecraft, along with the Gryffindor common room. It would be wise to avoid the Owlery completely.” No matter how old he got, it was never old enough to shake that feeling of teachers meaning more than what their mouths said to him. “This term they can think of nothing else. Before that, it was those dreadful portable game machines. Next year, it will be something new I suppose.”

Two hours later, when he stepped back into the Floo, he was just a little wiser about the properties of powdered Erumpent horn (blowing things up in a spectacularly unpredictable fashion) and unicorn hair (unparalleled purity capable of repelling hostile magic) and had signed approximately five million miniature replicas of the space shuttle _Suncatcher_. By the time he’d done the last of them, he was labelling them “ACTUAL SIZE” and signing himself as “Stubby Boardman” so it wasn’t, perhaps, a complete loss.

**

Of course, the only way to find out if Malfoy had nefarious purposes was to ask him. 

By the time evening rolled around again, he had convinced himself that the prudent course was to do just that. Find Malfoy. Seek him out. Ask him some questions. See if another one of those spectacularly sudden blow jobs was on the cards. Or something along those lines, Harry was becoming increasingly open to the idea of a broader menu of sexual acts. 

He had changed his mind four times and his shirt twice before he finally managed to drag himself out of the house. It was unsettling to want something from Malfoy that couldn’t be got by trickery, speed or sheer determination. But between taking the risk and resigning himself to another night of re-reading Malfoy’s file until his eyes bled and his hand blistered, he decided to take the risk. 

The alley outside Circe’s looked grimmer than ever. By the entrance, that tosser Smith was smoking with a few of his mates, dragging on the cigarette in the mannered, pinch-cheeked way he’d been perfecting since he was seventeen. “Potter,” he nodded in his over-familiar way, as if reminding Harry of a fond old joke they’d once shared. With his blond hair meticulously scruffed in the style he’d worn unchanged since school, he was more loathsome to Harry than ever. “Davies,” Harry nodded back, without stopping to see how he took it.

Inside, it was slow even for a Wednesday. In the open spaces between patrons, you could see the worn patches on the floorboard and the muck caught between the planks. Without the screen of crowds, the nooks looked like pits in the ground and the whole place smelled like a grave. The only novelty was the television they had installed for the launch, on a wooden platform over the bar. It was the most exciting venue in Knockturn. Harry hated it.

Malfoy was not in the main bar, nor in any of the side rooms. Approaching the bathrooms with some trepidation, Harry found himself relieved to see the corridor empty and nobody disturbing the storage area at the bottom of the stairs. He checked the main bar again, just in case he’d overlooked that unmistakable glimmer of white hair, but all he found was Lee Jordan, who called out to him in the voice he was keeping in practice for the day one of the four pro Quidditch commentators keeled over and left a vacant chair. 

“Oy, Harry!” And Harry knew what was coming from the grin he produced, part patriotism, part drunken camaraderie. “Cheers, mate. First witch in space!” 

It was as if Harry had grown her carefully from seed, rather than spending eleven glorious months hopelessly in love and the next few years wondering whether the gloss was ever coming back. Clearly no-one imagined that her triumph might instil in him any darker emotion than pride.

Knockturn Alley had emptied, except for an insistent, foggy sort of drizzle. The fine spray cooled his cheeks and cleared his head and, on the same gut instinct that had authored so much of the luck and calamity in his life, he strolled up into Diagon. The street looked shrunken without the bustle of wizards and witches, whose presence seemed to swell the little space into something grander. The shops were the same ones that had dazzled Harry on his first visit, now faded, now simply dull. Not a single cobblestone seemed to have changed. Some people would find that reassuring. A fat drop from Madam Malkin’s sign splattered on the bridge of his nose and he shook it away.

At the far end of Diagon stood the black marble edifice of Gringotts. Sheltered in a doorway nearby, he withdrew a little from the bulk of it. A huge black block with a bronze door like a mouth in the centre, inside was only meagre torchlight and tunnels. It must take a special sort of endurance to work with goblins. His eyes mapped out, beneath the surface, where the vaults would be. The basements of the neighbouring businesses would have to go down close to them. Around the back was King’s Cross and the powerful magic that kept the Muggles out. The only other access would be from the left side where Knockturn Close wound its way up from the alley towards the station.

How would you protect a fortress like this? Harry’s mind leapt with the possibilities. Policing every inch of such a labyrinth was impossible. You’d need a range of different spells, constantly innovating, changing daily. Access to each vault, he knew, was personalized to one or two individual Clankers, and he guessed that nobody apart from the Chief Goblin had access to them all. All sorts of hostile magic would have to line the vaults’ exposed side and, inside, trace charms to detect spellcasting. Even under the protection of the goblins’ devious and unexpected security measures, the place had not been impregnable. The pointed glares of the managers never let him forget that he’d been the one to prove it. Rumour said that, since the rebuilding, security had been upscaled several times over, courting the shaken confidence of investors. His breath misting in the air in front of him, Harry’s mind raced. How would you get into it? _How would you get into it?_ The underbelly might be vulnerable, if you could go down deep enough. Otherwise, brute force – an army of dragons this time – would be required. 

Standing in front of the huge bronze doors, Harry itched to have a reason to try. His blood pounded for action, his organs primed subconsciously for the thrill of danger. He had to admit, he’d forgotten how good the sensation felt, his body lifting itself to a higher state of being, ready to throw itself into action, ready to bend itself around whatever hazards lay ahead. 

It was only as he cut back through Knockturn towards home that he glimpsed what Malfoy was doing, and why. He missed a step and walked on, frowning. It was a stupid idea. Malfoy was making trouble. He was drawing others into his mess - not least of all, Harry. He was exposing himself to all sorts of gruesome means of death. He was – 

By the time he’d passed his street, turned back, and trudged through the rain to his front door, the edge had worn off his temper. Bleakly, he shoved the key in the lock. Behind it lay the same old empty rooms, the same old furnishings fossilized in Ginny’s tastes. The only novelty was the file that still lay open on his bed.

The soft-footed figure had slipped up beside him and installed itself against the wall by the door before Harry snapped out of his contemplation. His wand jerked out, too late, just as Malfoy’s hair and cloak swung into stillness. 

“I trust you weren’t expecting anybody else,” Malfoy said with smirking certainty.

Harry shrugged. “Never know your luck.” It was the closest thing to suavity he could manage with all the effort it took to keep the grin off his face. In any case, the sad fact was, with Ron and Hermione going through a prolonged truce, there was not a single other person Harry might have hoped to find on his doorstep on the ugly side of midnight. 

Malfoy’s face and his voice had frosted over. “Naturally, if you’d rather wait for a better offer-“

“This one’s good,” Harry said very quickly. A trickle of accumulated raindrops had run down the side of Malfoy’s nose and spread out over his mouth, making his lower lip shimmer invitingly. Suavity be damned, he was not going to let Malfoy walk away. He pushed the door wide open. “Come in.”

With a sidelong look that accused Harry of shirking due hospitality, Malfoy went in. When Harry caught up with him at the end of the corridor he was staring around in horror, at the bright modernist furniture, the pizza boxes piled on the table, the pictures of him and Ginny and her family that grinned down from the walls.

“Where’s the bedroom?” Malfoy demanded.

Harry nodded in its direction, one hand clutching the kitchen counter. “Don’t you want a drink?”

Malfoy frowned. “Not especially. You have one if you need it.”

“Yeah, right,“ Harry snorted, and stopped. He was falling into old habits again. Malfoy’s every word came out as a challenge, and Harry responded automatically. He forced his voice calm. “I’d like one, yeah.”

“Take your time,” Malfoy said, running his fingers through his hair and leaving it bone dry, as Harry fished that old bottle of Ogdens out of the cupboard and searched for a glass. 

When he turned back, Malfoy was slinging his robes over the back of the couch. The loose grey undershirt he wore beneath didn’t look like the sort of garment selected with seduction in mind. But as Harry poured, Malfoy planted his foot on the arm of the couch, pulled up his cuff and started unfastening the buckles of his boot. It was obscene the way his long leg bent up at an uncomfortable angle, pulling the fine fabric of his black trousers expressively tight, tightest over the curve of his arse, the top of his thigh, tight all the way down to his knee. 

“Right there, Potter?”

Harry hastily dumped the bottle and threw a tea towel onto the puddle of overflowed Firewhisky. By the time he’d mopped up the mess, Malfoy was shifting impatiently on his bare feet. Avoiding his gaze, Harry focused hard on the shot glass. Picked it up and licked the side of it where the alcohol had trickled. Ran his tongue around the rim. 

He wasn’t aware of Malfoy moving until a very firm grip seized his elbow.

“Sweet Lucifer on a stick, Potter. Drink it or put it away,” Malfoy snarled, low and hard, like Harry had never heard him before. “Don’t for fuck’s sake _play._ ”

Clutching the glass full-fisted, Harry threw it back in one gulp. As he turned, Malfoy caught him around the hips, his face close, and Harry was torn between how hot it would be to give in to Malfoy’s momentum and let Malfoy go down on him with his back wedged against the counter, and the equally compelling urge to shove Malfoy back against the cupboard and sink his mouth into his neck. Wrestling to a standstill, they teetered in the middle of the kitchen, Malfoy’s arms around his waist and Harry’s hands fisted in the front of Malfoy’s shirt. 

The air between them crackled with possibility. Harry was lightheaded with it. There were no niceties to be observed, no promises to be made, no submerged emotional rocks to be navigated. Only the certainty of desire and gratification, and the thrill of finding ways to turn the one into the other. Under his hands, Malfoy’s chest heaved. His lips were flushed and damp and inviting. 

“Bedroom,” Malfoy gasped, wrenching away from him. 

Harry staggered uncomfortably after him. Stumbling into the bedroom, he swung his wand in a clumsy arc, knocking over all the framed photographs and an empty vase, which Malfoy’s spell caught an inch above the ground. 

“Take it easy!” Malfoy’s breathless, unguarded laugh only fuelled the hunger in Harry’s chest. He at least let Malfoy lower the vase to the ground before he spun him around and snapped open all of his trouser buttons in one brutal tug. “Or not,” Malfoy said in a suddenly small voice as Harry moved in on him, mouth falling on his neck, one hand under his shirt, the other searching out the tight clench of his arse cheeks, reaching for as much bare flesh as he could get. Malfoy bucked in his arms, breathing hard. Struggling, he managed to angle his hips until his cock met Harry’s through a layer of denim and with a few artful thrusts, Harry was painfully hard in his jeans. 

It was Malfoy who retained the presence of mind to force some space between them so he could slide his trousers down over his hips. Harry could only watch, dumbstruck, as Malfoy emerged from the grey shirt, long and pale and naked with his erection standing up, glistening with need. In his fantasies, he’d gone slower, relishing the privilege of Malfoy’s nakedness that he’d spent so many hours picturing. Here and now, the pressure in his balls permitted no such indulgence: he tore off his clothes and dragged Malfoy onto the bed.

Malfoy didn’t mind it rough, if the way he squirmed underneath Harry was any indication, working his legs apart so that Harry sank down between them. When Harry’s glasses slipped down, Malfoy tweaked them off and tossed them onto the pillows. Trapped in the valley of Malfoy’s hips, lost in the slippery heat of their clashing arousals, Harry could do nothing but rut furiously against him. He bit Harry’s jaw once, playfully, and squeezed Harry’s arse and- 

“No!” Harry heard himself say, high and tight, and then, “Not so-,” and then it was all over: his release rushing ahead without him, draining him, splattering over Malfoy’s stomach and taking all of the exquisite tension inside him with it. He clenched his teeth against the pitiful wail that rose in his throat. He was seventeen again, wet between the legs after a nervous grope in the passage behind the one-eyed witch. Seventeen and wanting so badly to get things right for once. With something of a snarl, he threw himself onto his back and dropped his forearm over his face and wished that Malfoy would just fucking leave. 

Malfoy did no such thing. After a decent silence and a sigh that sounded like frustration, he rolled onto his side. Harry jumped when Malfoy’s hand clutched his, slippery wet and smearing cooling come all over his palm. When Malfoy positioned himself on all fours, hands either side of Harry’s head and the damp tip of his cock jutting into Harry’s belly, the demand couldn’t be ignored. Harry’s fingers curled open and let Malfoy’s arousal slide into them, and closed again firmly. 

And Malfoy started to buck into his fist. The tips of his hair brushed like cobwebs over Harry’s arm and the breath was starting to catch in this throat. Uncovering his eyes, Harry thrust out his tongue and let Malfoy’s nipple roll over it, hardening, tightening. Leaning up, he caught it between his teeth and Malfoy actually groaned and jerked his hips twice as fast into Harry’s hand. Harry was catching his desperation now, licking and biting indiscriminately as Malfoy’s chest dragged over his face, seeking out the sharp edges of his teeth and the sandpaper texture along his jaw. There were high, needy sounds rising in Malfoy’s throat as Harry wrenched his fingers tighter. Above him, Malfoy’s whole body was a quivering, shuddering blur of motion, straining towards Harry’s grip, clumsy with need, and then he was burying his face in the top of Harry’s head, spilling himself over Harry’s chest, jerking and thrusting with his breath held in tight as Harry made him come. 

Spent, he seemed to hesitate, as if contemplating another course of action, but in the end his knees and elbows gave way and he sank down onto Harry’s body with an exhausted sigh.

Cooling sweat between them and the occasional twitch of Malfoy’s waning arousal, Harry slid his hand into the small of Malfoy’s back and traced a lingering finger up and down his spine. He was embarrassed at how sentimental he felt in the aftermath of sex, missing the little noises of affection Ginny would have made, missing the way she curled up beside him and kissed his shoulder. He had no such expectations of Malfoy, of course. But Malfoy’s breath was dampening his hair, his lips just inches away from where Harry could find out what they tasted like. And his vertebrae felt as smooth as glazed china under Harry’s touch.

With a deep breath, Malfoy rolled away and pulled himself to his feet. 

“You can stay,” Harry’s mouth had blurted out before his mind could intervene. 

Malfoy just laughed, but since he was still naked as he disappeared into the hallway, he mightn’t be going far. 

When he returned, smelling faintly of soap, he climbed back onto the bed and placed a shot glass over Harry’s diaphragm. 

“Keep your strength up,” he smirked and downed a shot of his own. 

“I’m doing all right.”

Malfoy scoffed, “So far. This is barely the beginning.”

Harry pushed himself up on his elbow and drank. Malfoy was sitting cross-legged, leaning back against the pillows, and Harry’s pride was not enough to keep his eyes from the pale curls at the fork of Malfoy’s legs. Noticing this, Malfoy bent his legs up in front of him and conspicuously parted his knees. With a smug snap of his fingers, he summoned the bottle and poured another pair of shots. 

“Bloody hell, how much stamina am I going to need?”

“I’m not easy to please, Potter. You’ll need all the help you can get.”

Malfoy sounded playful. He sounded, and Harry knew he could be imagining it, he sounded like some of his defences had come down. As the second dose of Firewhisky fanned out through his body, it took the last tension with it. Far from being disgusted at Harry’s clumsy performance, he seemed quite determined to continue lounging with regal ease on Harry’s bed. Warm, amused, pleasantly fatigued, Harry stretched out, laid his head on the pillow and ran his fingertips over the inside of Malfoy’s thigh. 

“You know I’m an Auror, don’t you.”

Malfoy’s voice lost its lilt. “Imagine my surprise, Potter.”

Still stroking Malfoy’s thigh, he let his thoughts go on without him. “So you reckon it’s a coincidence that just when you’re in danger of getting into trouble with the law, you get a sudden urge to go down on me in a public bar.”

“Oh it’s no coincidence,” Malfoy told him coolly. “After a few more nights like this, you’ll be my obedient Auror stooge. You don’t imagine I’m enjoying this, do you?”

His lips had gone very thin, behind the mocking tone, and Harry had two appalling realisations one after the other. The first was that Malfoy might be angry enough to leave. The second was that his vague doubts about Malfoy’s motives weren’t nearly important enough to risk letting that happen.

“Tell me,” Malfoy said curiously, eyeing Harry’s impulsive grip on his ankle. “How hard is this going to be? What would I have to do to get you to expunge my entire criminal record? And don’t forget I’m used to negotiating with goblins. I can be very flexible when it comes to closing a good deal.”

Harry could feel the grin spreading out on his face like a banner. He was still grinning slightly when he pulled himself up, leaned in, and kissed Malfoy square on the mouth. 

“You can start with this,” Harry replied a good while later, once they’d come up for air. He guided Malfoy’s hand down to his reviving arousal. “If you make it good, I’ll be sure not to report you for lewd and indecent acts.”

Malfoy bit gently at his bottom lip. “If you like,” he murmured. “All you have to do is tell me how you want it.”

His cock surged in Malfoy’s fist. “I want-“ His lungs felt like they were collapsing, heart stirring feebly behind them. “Suck me again. Your mouth, it’s incredible.”

“Yes it is,” Malfoy smirked and, true to his word, treated him to another one of those toe-curling blow jobs. If it wasn’t quite as dizzying as the first time, Harry felt more than compensated by the knowledge that, after it, Malfoy would still be willing and naked and right here, in his bed, ready for more.

**

By 4am, they had both given up the pretence of sleeping. The two restless hours he’d dozed, kicking in discomfort with Malfoy’s knee in his chest and his mouth all gummy with come, would have to do. 

With his long legs curled up at the end of the couch and his knees wrapped in Harry’s only dressing gown, Malfoy looked almost relaxed as he sipped his tea. Amazing the difference it could make, having another human presence in the house. Harry watched the steam wafting up from Malfoy’s tea, making his hair droop, fascinated. Malfoy glanced at him with faint disapproval and bent over his cup. 

The weight of Ginny’s absence had increased slowly over her three years’ training, a cairn of rocks on his chest multiplying pebble by innocent pebble. It was only now, with the prospect of relief so close and so forbidding, that Harry remembered how much he was missing out on. Not just the sex, but the easy comfort of physical intimacy.

Chancing it, he sat in the middle of the couch and slid down until his head rested on Malfoy’s thigh. There was a terse silence, certainly, but no downpour of hot tea scalded his ear. Emboldened, he reached for Malfoy’s other hand and dragged it onto the aching joint where his neck met his shoulder.

“Just there,” he murmured. And finally Malfoy began to stroke him, a stiff, formal action, devoid of the intuitive finesse Malfoy had applied to all their sexual dealings. 

“If you were going to turn me in, you’d have done it by now, yes?” Malfoy said, sounding distracted, slowing his rhythm to a lazier speed. “There’s hardly any purpose in finding ways to keep-“

“Give it up, Malfoy.” Harry opened his eyes and twisted to look up at him. “Don’t do it. Gringotts is better protected than ever. You’ll get caught. Or worse.”

Malfoy’s face collapsed into an expression of pure astonishment. “Potter, what in the name-“

Harry gave his future as an Auror cursory consideration and decided to chuck it. “You’ve been reported. Someone sent a note on the weekend. They found traces of non-tradeables in the room you stayed in.”

Tipping his head onto the back of the couch, Malfoy laughed softly. “Did they now.”

He seemed more flattered than surprised. “You knew that,” Harry reproved. “You must have known that. How else would you have known you needed someone on the inside in the Aurors’ office?”

Malfoy sighed. His hand traced slowly over Harry’s neck, onto his chest, searching out his nipple beneath the t-shirt and rubbing it idly. Harry watched his clever, presumptuous fingers working. “If you’re determined to believe that your enormous influence in law enforcement eclipses any powers of personal attraction, far be it for me to talk you out of it.” He tugged at the t-shirt. “Why don’t you take that off again?” 

Harry let Malfoy undress him, well aware that his unveiled penis was broadcasting how effortlessly a few suggestive words from Malfoy had affected him. Insistent hands spread him out on the couch, his knees hooked over one armrest, arms curled back over the other. Then, kneeling on the carpet, Malfoy set to work with slow curiosity, sucking gently on his throat, biting his pectoral muscle until it strained in resistance, running his tongue through the damp hair in Harry’s armpit. 

“On the subject of your enormous influence in law enforcement,” Malfoy resumed a little later, closing his teeth around Harry’s nipple and letting it slide back through his teeth. “What’s this I hear about that arselicker McMillan” – another bite, a swipe of tongue – “getting his ugly face in the Prophet while you piss about with the trivial files?” 

He could hardly be coherent with Malfoy teasing him like this, but all the same, words were a sort of release from the unbearable tension of holding himself still.

“They love McMillan.” That was brilliant: Harry arched up into Malfoy’s coaxing mouth. His hand came down to touch the back of Malfoy’s head, where his hair was soft, the blunt ends of it velvety around the back of his neck. The Ministry building had never felt further away. “They don’t want Aurors like me when it’s quiet. They want – _ah!_ – they want people who toe the line and don’t fuck up. He’s their dream-”

He trailed off as Malfoy’s tongue dipped into his navel and flicked over the hardening head of his cock. 

“Go on, Potter.”

“He’s their dream fucking candidate.” Harry spoke from the gut, mind too drugged to intervene. “He quotes regulations by heart and gets everything authorised in triplicate before he so much as scratches his arse. Of course he wins the simulated duels - they disqualify you for anything that’s not out of Goshawk’s Standard.” 

He was only distantly aware that Malfoy had hoisted one of Harry’s knees up onto his chest, exposing the whole of his cock to hot breath and, finally, a hotter mouth.

“Who made him Head of Investigations?”

“Fucked if I know,” Harry spat, breaking off into a bitten-back groan of pleasure as Malfoy tongued his balls, finding hyper-sensitive, swollen skin among the thatch of hair, and licked a little further behind. “Office politics are a waste of time. I didn’t join up to spend my-“

The total silence was the shocking pressure of a wet finger sliding into him. The silence continued as Malfoy’s finger withdrew, paused, and penetrated him again, gently insistent against the clench of muscle. 

“Breathe, Potter,” Malfoy smirked, fucking him slowly with that filthy finger. “It won’t do any lasting damage.”

He shoved his elbow behind Harry’s knee to hold his legs open and lowered his head again. The unexpected penetration didn’t seem to have diminished his erection, and a few hungry swipes of Malfoy’s tongue had him bursting with desire again, scrambling to get his shaft back into the wet heat of Malfoy’s mouth. And then suddenly he couldn’t get enough of Malfoy’s finger in his arse either, twisting and coaxing and striking off lightning sparks up his spine as it went in deeper. He bucked and writhed until the pressure was unbearable, and then it broke and he came, eyes and mouth screwed shut to keep from sobbing with pleasure. 

“Lovely,” Malfoy murmured, stroking Harry’s shuddering thighs. When the last tremors of orgasm had calmed, Malfoy ran his free hand up Harry’s sternum, over his lips, and gently down one cheekbone and, after that, he removed his finger. 

**

Harry only had a dim memory of how they stumbled back to the bedroom afterwards, and a slightly more distinct memory of throwing Malfoy up onto the chest of drawers and bringing him off with Malfoy’s thighs clamped around his neck.

The next thing he knew, daylight was streaming through the gap in the curtains. Malfoy was still unconscious, his forehead against Harry’s shoulder and his lips slightly parted in sleep. In the easy fondness of morning, Harry touched the pillowy flesh of Malfoy’s lower lip. Malfoy stirred and sucked his lip into his mouth, burying his forehead more deeply in Harry’s shoulder. It wasn’t easy, since he guessed it was only a matter of days before he lost Malfoy to Zurich or Azkaban, to reach out and stroke the side of his face

Malfoy’s eyes flicked open, pupils wide in those first startled seconds as he tried to focus. For a moment, his lips made the first slow stretch towards a smile, but then his gaze flew past Harry to the window and the stripe of sunlight falling across it. And instantly, his face creased into the familiar lines and sharp corners.

“Oh hell,” Malfoy growled, leaping out of bed and shoving his slender legs one by one into those gorgeous, slenderer trousers. He threw his shirt on inside-out and made two attempts at fixing his hair in the mirror before slicking it back, like he used to wear it in school. 

“Wait a minute, Malfoy. Breakfast-”

Malfoy shook his head. “Can’t. Big day today,” he said, perfectly straight. “First witch in space.”

A few moments later, Harry heard the lonely clink of the front door. 

**

The first thing Harry did at work was commandeer one of the Ambassadorial Service’s special owls and send it off with a last-minute message for Ginny. “Take care,” it said. “I’m proud of you. I miss you.” And that was more true than not.

The next thing he did was conduct a random safety audit of McMillan’s office (thankful that he was still clinging by his fingertips to his seat on the staff committee), only to discover that Malfoy’s file was no longer in the tray marked “In”, nor any of the others. 

McMillan cleared his throat from the doorway. “Can I help you, Potter?”

“No sir,” Harry told him regretfully. “You’re not authorised. Not properly trained for a safety audit.”

He put the three draft letters he was holding into the “Signed” tray and weathered McMillan’s penetrating stare.

“I’ve read your report on the Gringotts call-out on Tuesday night,” said the Head of Investigations gravely. “Potter, you’re taking the mickey.”

Harry grinned. “Thought you’d like that stuff about the Chifpurzle. Look, I’ve got to go. You know. First witch in space.”

On the way out, he left Alexis with a man-eating pile of filing and the sort of promising smile that would keep the cadet damp for a week. 

A great deal of Britain’s magical community knocked off work at half four in preparation for the five o’clock launch, but only Harry Potter managed to be into the office just after eleven and out again by quarter past. 

**

After an afternoon kicking about at the Crossed Wands, where he could be pretty sure not to come across anyone from the Ministry, he made his way to Ron and Hermione’s. Even by four, the Leaky was packed, with a good handful queuing outside and hoping to get a glimpse through the windows. Since the wizarding stores had sold out of magic-adapted televisions over a week ago, those whose homes lacked electricity were thrown back on public bars. Circe’s would be packed to the rafters too.

Harry bypassed them all, heading for the townhouse on the tiny wedge-shaped block where Vertick Alley met the end of Diagon that Ron had got cheap because of the ghouls (which Hermione had evicted on the first weekend) and the bad neighbourhood (which Ron, Charlie and George had done their best to contribute to). As he walked in, Hermione was drawing a tray of slightly charred biscuits in the shape of spacecraft out of the oven. Harry, who had done quite a lot of research on the history of space travel in the early days of Ginny’s astronaut phase, was grateful not to believe in omens. 

“Give us a hand, Harry?” In the sitting room on the top floor, Ron was hanging streamers – Gryffindor colours with Ginny’s initials dangling in cut-out silver, tinkling daintily. It looked like Teddy had made the sign that said “First wish in spas”; the proud author was walking on the ceiling and giggling while George’s spell kept his boots pinned to the plaster. It looked like a typical dysfunctional Weasley afternoon.

Hermione yelled up the stairs. “Ron, did you get those glasses out?”

“Yeah.”

“The new ones?” 

“Yeah.”

“Not the ones with the chipped rims?”

“Yeah. No, hang on! They’ve all got chips.”

There was an ominous silence from below, then the sound of Hermione tersely spelling the icing onto the biscuits. Why she bothered wasn’t clear since, inevitably, George sent them into orbit before the tray even hit the table. With a small sigh of resignation, she settled on the couch and slapped Ron’s hand off her thigh. 

It stretched the imagination, but if Ginny weren’t just about to become Britain’s first magical space traveller, she’d be here too, helping Hermione with the glasses and bringing her hand down if Harry got too keen. He missed her fiercely, but he couldn’t deny it was easier to be fierce about someone when they lived on the other side of the ocean. In their last weeks together, in the suffocating wait while the Ministry negotiated covertly with the US authorities to sort out the trade-off between magical skill and technical training, everything about her had irritated him: her hoard of luxury cosmetics, her pig-headedness, her obsession with the bright and the modern, the contemptuous edge of her laugh.

Teddy’s roar of delight drew his attention to the television screen. Footage of Ginny in a pre-launch interview, recorded earlier. It was not a conclusion usually prompted by astronauts, but she looked incredible, striding out onto the tarmac. Fit and lovely in the white suit, her gorgeous hair still striking in its functional plait, and over it all, that blazing look he knew so well. He loved her in that moment, star-bound and skimming out of his reach, more than he had for years.

But the instant her image gave way to diagrams, his eyes glazed over. The best thing about the launch was its ability to distract him, sometimes for as long as four or five minutes at a time, from the memory of Malfoy’s naked body. He’d had all day to get it out of his system, but he could focus on nothing else. After as long as he’d spent without it, sex was like being on a boat. His limbs still rocked with the departed sensations. Malfoy’s tongue running up his neck. Malfoy’s silky, hot cock butting into his mouth. Malfoy’s - oh god, he could _not_ think about Malfoy’s fingers, not while his friends were in the room. 

Thankfully the appearance of the countdown clock distracted everyone from his unprompted blush. Sixty seconds. In sixty seconds, Ginny would go from “Harry Potter’s Girlfriend” to “First Witch in Space”. The shuttle began to vibrate as its engines fired up.

“Any moment now!” Ron said to Teddy, eyes never leaving the telly.

It was thirty seconds, twenty, the whole room was chanting along with the timer. 

“You’re getting ahead of it!” Hermione cried. 

The countdown passed ten, nine, eight and a few premature fireworks went off somewhere near the Ministry. Teddy’s eyes were almost as bright as the television screen; Ron’s were brighter. Harry could only watch numbly as the orange fire erupted from the engines. From houses all around and from the crowd out in the street, the familiar cry went up. _First._ Red and gold sparks flared over the skyline outside. _Witch._ Party horns hooted all around. _In._ The shuttle pushed itself up off the ground. _Spa-_

And then he heard it. 

Under the cacophony of celebration, a single word, thrumming into the walls and floor, almost too low for hearing. _“Thief!” “Thief!” “Thief!” “Thief!”._ Gringotts’ alarm. 

In two steps, Harry was at the window; his third fell on the pavement outside. Dodging through the crowd, he hooked around the corner into Diagon and hurried up it. Two black-clad figures Apparated outside Flourish and Blotts and charged towards Gringotts’ stairs. The first looked like McMillan. Both had wands drawn. Harry skidded to a halt, instinct taking over. As he sprinted back along Diagon and hairpinned the corner into Knockturn, he knew he’d made the right choice. The crowd was thicker here, packed thick around Circe’s where the TV commentary was cranked up high and magically enhanced so the whole alleyway could hear. This would be the better angle for a getaway. 

Knockturn Close was all but empty as he slipped into it and hurtled down its narrow stairs. Blocked off at the King’s Cross end since the Statute of Secrecy severed the last official links to the Muggle world, the Close was a refuge for dealings considered by the denizens of the alley itself to be altogether too shady. Harry paced the rotting cobblestones of its lower reaches, retracing his underground steps from Tuesday night. Gringotts’ north-west corridor curved around this way, they had followed the tracks on foot in search of evidence. It could be right under him.

His nostrils prickled with a rising burning smell and, whipping around, he caught a wisp of smoke rising between the cobblestones. That had to be it. His spellwork tore at the pavement, the little laneway echoing with the clatter of stones against the wall as he ripped them up. Underneath, he slashed at the layer of rock until it broke apart and finally, through a narrow chasm, the pale yellow torchlight of the corridor peeked through. He knelt over the aperture and inspected it. Damn! The dirt and pebbles collecting on the invisible barrier at the bottom of his fissure made it clear: there was a strong layer of protective magic lining the corridor roof. 

This time he felt the explosion. The ground trembled beneath him, though under the din of the fireworks, music and screeching televisions it was inaudible, and another faint layer of dust and smoke rose up. 

“Malfoy!” he hissed into the gap, then gave up and shouted. _“Malfoy!”_

A blue flash erupted to the left of the rent in the corridor roof and shot past his view. An authoritative voice threw a disarming spell then a stunning spell, exactly as ordained in Arrest Protocol 27, but they were met with another fierce explosion. 

“For fuck’s sake! Malfoy!” he called again, and this time a familiar face jerked into view below him. Pale and singed, ash-streaked with blood matting in the hair over his left ear, Malfoy appeared to be still in one piece. For now. 

His eyes gleamed dangerously. “Oh, well done Potter!” Before Harry could bask too much in the unprecedented thrill of approval, Malfoy ordered, “Stand back. Well back.”

And just as Harry stepped away, the ground underneath him shook again as whatever Malfoy was wielding managed to throw rocks flying, even through the wards’ protection. In the jagged skylight that now opened onto the corridor roof, Malfoy staggered and coughed – but at least the dust and smoke equally blinded the pursuit. Holding both his hands in front of him, Malfoy conjured the scraps of rock into a rough staircase. 

“It is my duty to inform you,” echoed McMillan’s unmistakable bellow from down the corridor. “That it is an offence to resist the apprehension of an Auror. You are requested to (a) surrender your weapons and (b) submit to questioning. If you resist, you are hereby warned that deadly force will be used.”

Malfoy threw something from his pocket and the answering blast came flying back.

Harry’s frustrated spell made no impact on the protective wards that held Malfoy trapped beneath the ground. “I can’t get through them!”

Malfoy actually winked at him. Then he pulled up the hood of his robes, obscuring his face, and briskly climbed up the makeshift stairs, slicing through the wards as easily as a prow in water. He was two steps short of the summit when a well-aimed hex whisked through his staircase and turned the stones into smoke. Harry suffered an instant of Malfoy’s horrified, desperate gaze before their arms shot out simultaneously, and joined, and Harry jerked him up into the Close. 

Gasping for breath and still clutching his wrist, Malfoy reeked of adrenalin from top to toe. His every movement came quickly, fluidly, and his eyes crackled with furious intent, inches away. It filled Harry with the most urgent and inappropriate longing. He settled for brushing his wandtip over Malfoy’s bleeding ear, murmuring a spell of healing.

Under the grime, he could just make out the slight shimmer in the thread of Malfoy’s robes, the same ones he’d worn the night they’d met up. “Unicorn hair!” he voiced his conclusion. “Isn’t it?” 

“Hand-stitched by the light of the full moon.” Malfoy wore a remarkably healthy looking smirk for a man so pale. “Most potent protective magic known. Undetectable to the trace wards down there, too. Unlike my wand.”

He looked wistfully down into the corridor. 

“So if you don’t mind.” He wound his arms around Harry’s neck expectantly. Harry stared, mouth watering. Then he got the point. Thinking of home, he Apparated. 

With a nauseating jerk, their bodies materialised right where they had left, stranded.

Malfoy’s eyes showed the first signs of panic. “Ah. The wards must extend outside the bank’s premises. Well then.”

It was hard to think with Malfoy still pressed up against him, his heart hammering fast as hummingbirds’ wings. He dragged Harry aside just in time to evade another stunning spell that shot up from the corridor below. Back up in Knockturn Alley, indignant shouting announced the presence of the pursuit there too. Glancing up the laneway and back, Harry had a horribly vivid realization of how hard a time someone with Malfoy’s history would get in Azkaban. 

“Hold on,” he said. 

He was gratified by the faith with which Malfoy clung to his neck. He pointed his wand down. _“Abigo!”_

Banishing the ground had the expected effect: he and Malfoy shot up into the air. At the apex of their flight, three storeys up, gravity took control, but just as they peaked, Harry’s spell latched onto the guttering and forced it out towards them, spanning the narrow lane with it. It was enough to hold them both up, clinging by their fingertips to its edges as it strained and, slowly, bent.

From there on, they did everything short of literally flying. Malfoy curled one long leg up onto the eaves and hauled himself onto the roof. Bracing himself, he pulled Harry up after him and, with the spells from below coming with increasing ferocity and abandoning Arrest Protocol entirely, they fled. Stray tiles shot away under their feet as they sprinted over the old buildings lining the Close, stumbling on the angled roofs. Soiled by birds, rotted through, the elderly structures provided treacherous footing navigable only with the most unwavering concentration. Harry on the left, Draco wandless on the right where the roof pitch sheltered him from the Aurors’ spells, they dodged around chimneys, hurdled over gables, outpacing the pursuit that struggled through the crowd below. Harry’s body was moving faster than his mind. Everything blurred except the challenge of the next step.

The rooftop ran out first. 

“No choice,” grimaced Malfoy at his elbow. “Have to jump.”

They picked up speed and sailed out over Knockturn Alley, arms wheeling.

Harry came down first on the other side, latching onto a wooden strut that left splinters under his nails. Beside him, Malfoy’s toes hit awkwardly and he snatched out at the tiles, scrabbling for a fingerhold, finding nothing. He teetered, as if drawn backwards into the void. 

It must have been all the Quidditch. Harry knew without looking exactly where Malfoy’s hand would be. He shot out and caught it. Malfoy righted himself without a word, held on tight, and with the faintest indulgent squeeze, broke free, scrambling up to the top of the roof and hurtling towards Diagon. 

“Malfoy!” Harry said beside him, blocking a jelly-legs curse that would have been fatal here and now and, to be honest, starting to get a little bit high on the danger. “How much did you make tonight then?”

Vaulting up onto the next roof, Malfoy smirked back at him. “Nothing.” He waited til Harry had almost caught him up and then he was off again, skipping nimbly over the slanted tiles. “The deal was fifty thousand if I penetrated the compound, three hundred for getting into one of the high security vaults.”

“Bloody hell! And if you can’t get in, I suppose you get nothing and Gringotts get to say they’re unbreakable. No wonder they’d rather get you arrested than-”

He swore as his foot went through a weak stretch of timber. In a moment, Malfoy was steadying him as he pulled himself free. 

Malfoy shrugged. “They’re goblins.” 

Steadying himself against Malfoy’s chest, Harry tested his foot: still functional. “Why did you – _Protego!_ – Why did you do it then? If you knew all along.”

Malfoy looked affronted. “I’m not mucking around here, Potter. I take my work seriously.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “And now I’m only the second person in about a hundred years to break into Gringotts.” 

There was more than just pride in Harry’s chest as he sprang off again, hot on Malfoy’s heels as they ran along the ridge of the roof, heads down. Malfoy was probably still an arse, but he was a dangerous, exciting arse and Harry flushed with pleasure at this one thing that only they two had in common, at the warmth behind the smile Malfoy had put with his words.

“They’re going to jump again,” shouted a voice from below. “Get around into Diagon Alley, knock them down!”

At the end of the block, the rooftop ended again. There was only the wider gap of Diagon, much too wide to clear. The spells were shooting all around them now: the roof behind them was blazing and a chimney toppled and fell. Now that he was alert to it, Harry could still feel the slight tug of the protective wards.

“They can’t cover Diagon itself,” Malfoy said at his side. “People Apparate there all the time. Let’s do it.”

And Malfoy’s hand slipped back into his, confident and still. 

As they leaned out over the gap, the crowd of Aurors and goblins rounded the corner beneath them. The moment his feet lost contact with the gutter as they fell, he focussed hard on his destination. Malfoy’s grip stayed firm as they sailed towards their doom. Then somewhere around the first storey, Harry smiled, closed his eyes and Apparated.

**

“Oh, Harry!” Hermione scolded. No-one else appeared capable of speech, except Teddy who used an expression he had recently learned from George.

It was absurd to be standing in Hermione’s sitting room, with a tray of half-crumbled space shuttle biscuits and a glass of milk on the table, a room full of gaping faces, and Malfoy’s hand still clasped in his. At his shoulder, Malfoy was still panting from the chase, both of them filling the quiet room with gasped breath. A quick glance confirmed the sweat in the roots of his hair, the soot, the dried blood. His eyes locked hard with Harry’s; he seemed more alive than anyone else in the room. He smelled of smoke and recklessness. Harry had to force his fingers to let Malfoy go. 

“What’s _he_ doing here?” Ron snarled and Harry, still dizzy with exhilaration, wanted to punch him.

“Well, I couldn’t exactly-” Harry stopped. How could they sit there with their stupid questions, slouched in their armchairs, while his whole body was still telling him he could fly if he only bothered to step to the window? How could he explain to them he felt like a man rising out of his grave, and Malfoy’s was the healing hand? “It’s kind of a long-”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Potter,” Malfoy growled as he threw himself across the distance between them and pinned Harry to the wall with his mouth.

Self-defence was a powerful instinct, but apparently not half as powerful as the instinct for opening his mouth under Malfoy’s demand. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to it, and where their tongues met, all the fear and triumph of the rooftop flight simmered to the surface. And then he wasn’t just letting himself be kissed, he was devouring Malfoy’s mouth with two fistfuls of straining robes and a rhythmic, moaning sound slipping out around the wet meeting of their lips. 

They were probably crazy with adrenalin but Harry had never felt so wholly suffocated with desire as he did right now. Malfoy’s tongue thrust and strained into his mouth as if he meant to eat Harry from the inside. His iron grip on Harry’s shoulders bruised through two layers. Breathing was something he could dispense with forever if it meant being able to keep Malfoy pressed up against him like this, sucking like a drowning man on Harry’s mouth. Harry squirmed against Malfoy’s embrace until he could wrap both of his arms around the back of Malfoy’s head and draw them so tightly together he could have taken both feet off the ground and wound them around Malfoy’s waist, as he was embarrassingly tempted to do. Even so, the kiss just got deeper. 

The rest of the room has receded so far away that he scarcely noticed the impact on his shoulder, but George’s second spacecraft biscuit shattered against his ear and got his attention. Sliding his palms down Malfoy’s front, he eased a little gap between them, reaching across it for another quick plunge into Malfoy’s mouth, and another, then reluctantly leaning back. He straightened his glasses and gave Hermione the cockiest look he could with Malfoy’s spit glistening all over his lips. 

“That’s what everyone wanted, isn’t it? For me to put it about a bit more. Well, I hope you’re all happy.” All of a sudden, cheap hits like that seemed utterly pointless next to the flutter of Malfoy’s breath against his temple. “Excuse us.” 

With a guilty glance at Teddy, who it turned out had been much more interested in catching the levitating biscuits in a Doxy net than watching two grown men kiss each other, he slipped his hand around Malfoy’s wrist and led him downstairs to the little ground floor guest bedroom Hermione had kitted out for him in winter when his empty house had got too much. 

By the time they reached it, they were a two-man tower of groping hands and straining shoulders. 

“Watch it!” Harry laughed into Malfoy’s mouth as a couple of books tumbled off the top shelf. Far from quietening, Malfoy shoved him into the bookcase again, one hand forcing its way under his robes and groping his chest. Silenced by another rough kiss, the most he could do was shove back, glancing them both off the doorframe and into the room. He bit at Malfoy’s neck, tasting soot and sweat, and somehow two of his fingers were in Malfoy’s mouth, channelling the fleeting moan he got as he pumped them in and out. Whatever they did to each other from here on in was going to be brutal and Harry was rock-hard with anticipation.

The sound of his shirt tearing very nearly brought him off there and then. Malfoy gave it another good jerk, baring Harry’s shoulder and sinking his teeth in. Harry’s touch of wandless magic finished the job and Malfoy clawed the shreds of the shirt down his torso, punishing the naked skin beneath with his hungry hands. When their mouths came back to each other, both of them had given up the vanity of silence. Backed against the wall by the door, the vocal thread of Malfoy’s breathing was sharpening into a whimper as Harry ground into him, licking the trail of dried blood over his ear. When Malfoy responded, biting his way up Harry’s neck, jaw straining around as much flesh as he could get then switching dizzyingly to teasing flicks of his tongue, Harry just fisted both hands in Malfoy’s hair and let himself moan. 

“Like that?” Malfoy growled into his ear. He pulled Harry forward to encourage him to rut against his thigh and went back to torturing his neck. “I’ll give you something to make a noise about.”

It was only when Malfoy’s hand slid down his back and into his trousers that his throat got too tight for anything but silence. 

“No?” The bottom had fallen out of Malfoy’s voice: he sounded as choked as Harry felt.

“Yes!” he hissed. “ _Yes._ We’re doing everything tonight, Malfoy. Do you hear me? I want everything.”

There was no missing the spasm that passed down Malfoy’s body. He bit Harry’s ear and held on to it, stilling. 

“Not like this you don’t.”

“Yes,” Harry insisted, an edge of frustration, panting against Malfoy’s cheek. “I know what I bloody want.”

When Harry kissed him, his eyes fluttered closed and he looked just about as defeated as Harry had ever seen him. “Trust me, Harry,” he said without opening his eyes. “Take the edge off first. I’ll split you in half like this.”

Reaching out blindly, he stroked Harry’s arousal through his jeans then, losing patience, flicked open Harry’s buttons to wrap his fingers around its naked length. Harry shuddered. With a twist of his wrist that made the floor lurch under Harry’s feet, he let go and freed his own arousal. That was deadly: the fierce pulse and uncompromising hardness of their two cocks, skin to skin. Long fingers encircling them both, Malfoy worked them until they were straining hard and slick. Harry watched, captivated by their two leaking, bobbing heads, by the white strain in Malfoy’s knuckles, the odd tangle of pale and dark pubic hair beneath. He went back for another taste of Malfoy’s mouth, stroking Malfoy’s chest through his shirt, licking the side of his neck until he flung his head back as if to say _please_. That moment of surrender undid Harry completely. Mouth smothered in the side of Malfoy’s neck, he came hard and brought Malfoy right along with him. 

As they slid down the wall, spent limbs giving in to gravity, Harry kept himself carefully entangled with Malfoy’s limbs. As they settled, he kissed Malfoy again, because he didn’t know if he’d ever find anyone else who kissed him like Malfoy did, meeting him mouth to mouth without the slightest hint of yielding.

“Don’t get sentimental,” Malfoy murmured afterwards, his voice not quite reaching its usual drawling note. “You’re smuggling me into Waterloo early in the morning. I’m on the first train for Calais.”

Harry retained just enough acuity to grasp at two vital words.

“Tomorrow morning,” he repeated.

“ _Early_ morning,” Malfoy clarified, thumb tracing Harry’s jaw. “So you had better stop pissing about. We won’t have time to sleep as it is.”

** 

Later, on the bed, with his knees pressed into his chest and two of Malfoy’s spell-slicked fingers sliding into him, the effort of suppressing his defensive instincts brought home to him how far he had come in a few rollercoaster days. 

“I could have hit you, you know,” he mused. “Some men would have. Someone like Ron would have killed you if you made a move on – oh fuck, Malfoy!”

Now that he’d found that trigger, Malfoy didn’t seem able to leave it alone. Harry didn’t mind. It drove him crazy being touched like that, and he was learning that dead on the fine line between desire and desperation was where he most liked to have his feet. 

“How did you-“ he resumed as soon as he could “-know I wouldn’t?”

He could feel Malfoy smirking. Parting his knees was no help: behind the falling white hair, only the pointed tip of Malfoy’s nose was visible, and his tongue searching out the places on the underside of Harry’s cock that made him writhe.

“How?” Harry steeled himself and repeated.

Malfoy idly sucked the head into his mouth and massaged it with the soft inside of his lips. He looked up at Harry, bright eyed, with his lips still stretched around it and suddenly all the air had gone out of Harry’s lungs. 

“You really have no idea what your face looked like, do you?” Malfoy said, releasing him without changing the slow, intent rhythm of his fingers. “When I opened my eyes and saw you watching me with that bloke from Puddlemere.”

Harry dragged in just enough breath to ask, “Go on then. What did I look like?”

“You looked like a kid outside the window of Honeydukes, begging to be let in.”

“And you thought-“ At Malfoy’s instigation, he tilted his hips to let another finger inside him, the pain slowly burning away. “You thought you should open the door, did you?”

“I thought,” Malfoy told him, voice sinking to scarcely audible. “About fucking time, Harry Potter. That’s what I thought.” 

The bedroom had fallen dark enough that he couldn’t be entirely sure, but it looked like Malfoy might be blushing as he went back to rubbing the rough edge of his chin down Harry’s shaft.

**

The memory of that moment was still lingering at the fringes of his consciousness as Malfoy stroked his hips and the side of his ribs, easing the discomfort of penetration. 

“Okay,” Harry gasped, and this time the pressure inside him was more pleasure than pain. 

Malfoy had fallen very quiet behind him. “You’ll find it easier on your knees, if you can handle the indignity,” Malfoy had informed him teasingly, but Harry wanted to see his face now. Wanted a better idea of what was happening between them. 

“Go on. You can-“ But before he’d finished the sentence, Malfoy was fully sheathed inside him, panting into the back of his neck.

Harry screwed his eyes shut, mouth in a tight grimace. There was no surprise in the strain of it, only in the absolute feeling of intimacy, of being breached as fully as he ever would be. His cock surged and pounded. When he lowered his forehead onto his clenched fists, his balls pressed back into Malfoy’s, picking up the tender warmth and weight of them.

“Malfoy?” he said unevenly, because he hadn’t expected to come from this, was totally unprepared for the overwhelming sensation of it. 

“ _Hmm?_ ” A tight, irritated sound that seemed to be as much as Malfoy could manage. 

That was the thing about Malfoy: no matter what, you could never quite be sure what lay behind the instinctive disdain. But a few moments later, his hand shifted down onto the mattress, overlapping with Harry’s.

“I thought you said no pissing about,” Harry said with a breathy laugh, relief coming out as mockery. “It’s only eight hours til your bloody train.” 

Then Malfoy started to move, and Harry was at the mercy of his rhythm, torn between the flashes of pain and the unbearably intense pleasure. Very soon, Harry found himself pressing back to meet each thrust, wanting it harder, wanting it deeper, wanting it any damn way that drove him into new sensations and kept Malfoy making those gasping, whining noises that proclaimed how very far his self-control had slipped.

There were a few sweet seconds where Malfoy’s hand fisted around his cock, pumping to the same beat as his hips. But just as Harry gave himself up to it, Malfoy drew in that telltale deep breath and held it, and tumbled into orgasm, mouth moving against the back of Harry’s shoulder. 

As Malfoy turned him on his back and, one more time, sucked him into oblivion, Harry watched his shameless mouth and his veiled eyes and wondered if he’d ever be sure what was going on behind them.

**

In the low light from the lamp on the wall, Malfoy’s face looked peaceful as he brushed his thumb over Harry’s nipple, hand spread out on Harry’s chest. An idea struck him with visible inspiration and a moment later he was scrabbling in the pool of discarded clothes. 

For a dreadful moment, Harry thought he was getting dressed again and he took a leisurely look up the lean lines of Malfoy’s legs, over the curve of his arse, the span of his shoulders, just in case it might be his last. But Malfoy only retrieved a blue velvet pouch from a pocket and dropped his robes back on the floor.

Perched on the bed by Harry’s stomach, he emptied a pile of coloured gems onto the sheet. 

“Payment for services rendered,” he said to Harry’s wide-eyed expression, lips twitching in satisfaction. “And if it’s a little over three hundred thousand, we’ll call it a dishonour fee.”

Harry turned a pale blue stone over in his hand, as big as a cherry and even in the lamp’s low light throwing sparks onto the ceiling. 

It was hopeless. As Malfoy searched through them, Harry could only watch his white fingertips swimming in the rainbow of glitter and wish they were back on his skin. Finally Malfoy selected a small rust coloured stone and snatched Harry’s wand from the floor. Before Harry could make his bruised lips object, he had bent over the wand, murmuring a muffled spell. He seemed to hesitate as he held it out.

“Firestone,” he said quickly. “It’ll be right for your wand core. Try it.”

Harry took it. The stone was set into the base of his wand, filling its whole circumference. He didn’t need to try it. Already, the wand felt more focussed in his hand. 

“ _Leviosa._ ” Distracted as he was, and tired, the picture frame across the room rose squarely into the air, sitting as stably as if mounted on rock. Its glass reflected the lamplight without the slightest tremor. He shot it once around the ceiling’s four corners, stopping it with perfect precision each time, and replaced it on the shelf.

Then he put the wand on the bed behind him and drew Malfoy’s hand to his lips.

“Come here,” he murmured. And even bruised and battered as his body had got, it appeared he was not yet tired of the eager caress of Malfoy’s tongue in his mouth, or the way Malfoy wrapped him expressively in those wiry arms and legs. 

**

The platform at Waterloo was crowded by the time they made their way from the dead-end lane where Malfoy had Apparated them. Though he’d hesitated a fraction before the first step onto the escalator, Malfoy showed no further sign of discomfort, secured inside in a tailored black coat that made Harry think longingly of the naked lines of his waist. As he slid the small bag back onto his shoulder, Harry shuddered to think of the remaining pellets of Erumpent horn that were probably still packed within it.

“It’s not so bad if you buy two seats,” Malfoy said, eying the train cautiously. 

Harry gave up. “Are you going back to Zurich then?” It almost sounded as if the question might be no more than curious. “Once you get to Calais.”

Malfoy answered with an affected shrug. “Depends where the work is. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Zurich banks. Their defences are pretty tight now. They only want me once a year to make sure the staff aren’t getting lazy.” 

He could just get on the train, Harry thought. The clock above the platform showed about a minute to departure. There was no reason to be hanging around here. Unless, like Harry, he was waiting for something. 

“Listen, Malfoy-“

“No sense in standing about where the law can find me, is there. See you then.” He checked his ticket and moved toward the nearest carriage. 

“No,” Harry insisted, catching the corner of Malfoy’s bag and detaining him. “This isn’t enough. I want to see you again.”

Malfoy’s expression was indeterminate, his head twisted away with a slight scowl at the bearded backpacker who was farewelling his girlfriend with just a bit too much ardour. Harry almost wondered if he’d heard. When he turned back, he looked nothing but composed. Slowly, he leaned in.

“Lausanne,” he whispered, hot breath in Harry’s ear. “The wandmaker by the cathedral knows where to find me.”

And then he sprang up into the train and reappeared in a window seat. Harry leaned against a pillar until the train had pulled out, watching Malfoy bent over his book with intent studiousness, watching him fail to turn over a single page, watching for the one moment when Malfoy turned to meet his eyes, with a look of pleased exasperation, before burying his face back in the book. Harry held on until the last minute before he had to let go.

**

Wandering back the long way through Southwark, he sat in the front window of the Cauldron and Kettle and had a thoughtful tea. At his elbow, the fresh-printed Prophet was broken between two lead stories. Predictably, the header was dominated by that spectacular shot of Ginny in her space suit. Underneath it, unexpectedly, Malfoy gazed breezily up at him out of that old picture from the awards ceremony. And in the bottom right corner, a shot of himself, and a dragon that looked familiar. _Second Gringotts break!_

He held his wand towards the window so the new gem in it sparkled. Its potential slept in his palm. It was a wand wasted in the regimented world in which he worked; a wand for action, for pushing boundaries. A wand, perhaps, for breaking into banks.

Ginny would be six months on the space station before her return to earth, floating in a world where the old rules were outrun and there was no such thing as upside-down. As he twirled the wand in his fingers, Harry felt a bit the same way.

**


	2. Gravity

The first thing Draco did on returning from Zurich was head upstairs, on the pretext of urgently hanging up his travelling cloak. Pausing on the penultimate stair, he lingered upon the expected view, the one that had prompted him to buy this place above all the others, more than two years ago, as soon as he'd earned enough fees and enough credit with one of his larger lender clients to afford it. Through the ceiling-high windows lay the perfect blue of the lake and the mountains beyond it crowned in snow.

One step higher revealed a different view. Harry Potter stretched out in Draco's bed, his tousled black hair standing out against the white covers, a work of art entitled 'freshly shagged'. No surprise that he was still in bed. For three ragged weeks there had been nothing either of them cared to do that called for any other location. With his forearms tucked under the pillow, his bare shoulders and back looked broader, more capable than ever – had he always been built like that or was it the one thing for which Draco ought to thank the Aurors? Even at this late hour, his chest rose and fell dreamily.

The two perspectives complemented each other. One distantly, coldly majestic, the other personal and touchingly ephemeral. Both stunning to Draco's eyes. Both the sort of view to make a former Death Eater sentimental with an unexpected sense of good fortune. 

Preferring the more human view, Draco drew himself on cautious hands and knees onto the bed, raising himself over Harry's back. He leaned down indulgently and kissed the tender spot behind Harry's ear, just where the pliant upper reaches of his neck met the spur of his skull. He nudged aside the lower locks of Harry's hair that sheltered the pulse-warmed skin and trapped the intimate, inimitable smell of Harry. And as Harry stirred, he did what he had never expected to have the urge to do to anyone and traced his lips and the tip of his nose over that stretch of skin, burrowing further into Harry's sleepy presence. Pain all down his chest and tightness in his balls. Nobody did that to him but Harry.

When Harry stretched underneath him, flexing all those gorgeous muscles across his back, Draco eased himself down so that Harry was pinned under his weight.

"Nice," Harry slurred as Draco gave in to temptation and bit the side of his neck. "Very nice. What are we doing today?"

That was an awkward question. In the satchel he had hung beside his cloak was a letter of offer from a bank in Mumbai. Nearly a month between jobs now, he was still in two minds about taking it. It could be an unstated condition of Harry's presence here that he was willing and ready to share in Draco's trade. Draco had not broached the subject yet. His trade was hard-won territory. And Harry's instinct had always been to compete and then to win. Every time he had pitted himself against Harry he'd come away the loser, except – well, the exception just didn't bear remembering. Possibly the dynamic between them would be harmonious now, after all these days when their bodies had barely been more than an arm's reach apart. But on the other hand, didn't that just gave him more to lose? 

His professional life would wait. When Draco cobbled together every Knut he owned, his not inconsiderable savings, the saleable knickknacks, and the small tokens he'd retained from jobs here and there, he calculated that if they lived on cheese and dry crackers, he could do nothing but sit at home and shag Harry Potter for two years, eight months and twenty-one days.

It wasn't nearly enough, but it would do.

As Harry gently struggled beneath him, Draco let him have his freedom and rolled onto his side. Head resting on one elbow, Harry looked up at him, his cheek creased from the pillow, his scruffy hair unrepentantly carnal, and his eyes bright without their frames. Draco touched Harry's jaw with an incredulous forefinger.

"Hmmm?" Harry prompted.

"We're staying in," Draco said with unshakable determination and kissed him.

**


End file.
